Additional Resources

FAQs.

Over the course of a week, there are several questions that always come up. They’re not complex, and they don’t take long to answer, however, it some takes time away from everyone. :) So, starting now, this is holding place for developers and anyone else who needs a quick information fix.

Do you offer a plugin for my web platform/CMS/e-commerce system?

Sometimes. We currently have plugins for Wordpress, and Drupal, though neither of them have the same capabilities. Our Wordpress one simply embeds a webform and uses the API to submit, the Drupal module actually allows you to funnel all mail that your site sends through Mimi. We’re hard at work, making sure that the Drupal module has a way to easily embed webforms, and that the Wordpress module gets mailing capability soon. ;) We’ve also heard about Magento, which we’re looking into now.

Also, it might not be of help now, but we’ve got libraries in multiple languages, including PHP, Python, Ruby, and C# – if you want to roll your own plugin.

I’m getting a “Bad Gateway Error”, what does that mean?

Hmmm. At what speed are you connected to the internet? How long does it take to ping the closest major city? If your initial answer is pretty slow, or it takes a while (over 100 milliseconds) to ping, you’re likely on what we consider to be a high-latency connection. Basically what that means is – it takes a long time for our server to ever get your request (because of your connection) and then, we don’t have enough time to get the request back to you before your computer gives up. Make sense?

The easy solution is just to get a better connection, and then try, but of course, if you’re stuck with your iPad in the airport – we’ll gladly send your promotion for you. ;) This is also something we’re continuously working on too. The future looks incredibly bright for mobile devices, and no web application should discriminate against them.

Weird characters are appearing in my promotion… what did I do?!?

Ah, the age old problem: pasting from Word, Wordpad, Pages, or well, pretty much any word processing or graphic design application can cause funky characters to appear in your promotion. You see, there’s a little thing called encoding, which ensures everyone sees your message properly when you send it. Unfortunately, this awesomeness also backfires sometimes.

Mimi uses what is known as UTF-8 encoding. Apple uses MacOS Roman, and Word (and other Microsoft programs) sometimes favor ISO-8859-1 (what a mouthful!). So, what does this mean for you?

Basically, anything you copy or paste will need to be saved in UTF-8, prior to copying and pasting into Mimi to ensure compatibility – and most programs make this easy, offering an option to save with a certain encoding, so check whatever program you’re working with. ;)

My CSV won’t import. Any ideas?

Yep. Just make sure it has a header, or we can’t parse it. (This applies if you’re trying to use the API, or upload a file.) You may know what the columns contain, but Mimi surely doesn’t. Confused? Use this as a guide:

Also, as shown here, CSV headers need to be lower case, and cannot include spaces. If you must, use an underscore. ;) Note, I also didn’t use spaces in my CSV around the commas. That tends to bugger stuff up too, so please, don’t do it. :)

My custom domain doesn’t seem to be working… help!

One commonly overlooked requirement is that you actually have a domain or subdomain that you want to use. For instance, you could use go.mydomain.com, but not *.mydomain.com. Wildcards don’t work here, folks. After you’ve picked out a domain, just set the A record (“value”) to 216.180.230.174. Afterwards, you may add the Custom Domain addon.

I need to send mail, but I keep getting API errors… what’s up with that?

In order to keep our sender reputation clean, and your emails landing in people’s inboxes – every time someone starts to use the Mailer API, we’ll have to approve your request. Rest assured though, we’ll be in touch, or often just approve, if your current account is in good standing. It only takes a few minutes, but we think it’s worth it. Impeccable delivery is priceless.